Scattergun advertising or targetting the right people?

Tonight I posted on my Twitter account that I was very pleased to note that second month download figures for our quarterly company magazine were up by 300% on the previous record set back in September. At the current rate this issue could become the most downloaded of all online editions by the middle of next month just two months after publication.

It is true that a more concerted promotional campaign has been implemented this time with many other media streams being used in advertising. Twitter was one, forums were another plus co-promotion through magazine contributor websites and on technical chat channels too. This final example happened by accident as a fellow staff member mentioned that he was included in an article in online discussions. Readers of his comments were not aware of the magazine so they visited the website to take a look.

As I was looking at the current stats I felt like I wanted to share that success. Before posting the comment I again added the URL for magazine without explaining what it was. Some may have thought it was to the magazine itself while others I’m sure may have been expecting a link to a more in-depth article about the statistics.What seems certain that there were some who would be getting a PDF download that they hadn’t anticipated.

This set me thinking – was I being unintentionally misleading and actually encouraging downloads for the wrong reasons? Does that even matter? Getting people to read the magazine is a good thing if it explains the work we are doing as a company but if the subject is of no interest to the individual are those stats worthless? We are a non-profit organisation in the Internet industry and part of our remit is to work for benefit of the industry as a whole so does that justify this method of communication?

I am not going to give an answer as such but rather throw it open for debate. Would you chase the statistics with a scattergun approach or would you be more targetted in your distribution looking to communicate with those more closely aligned with your industry sector?